Biblical Thinking? Secular Thinking?

Doubtless I'm not the only one who's heard this distinction put forward and pressed in any number of ways. And doubtless there's a lot of truth to it: after all, the Bible does lay out ways to view reality, God, ourselves, which are exclusive of others: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.

On the other hand, sometimes this distinction is pressed in an absolute and comprehensive way which I don't find helpful. I remember talking to a Christian counselor once who told me he doesn't read Freud, he reads the Bible; he doesn't try to analyze the unconscious, but approaches clients against the backdrop of the language of the Psalms concerning the "heart." I certainly wouldn't want to imply that counselors shouldn't be applying their Bible's more--but I wonder if that adequately catches the purpose behind God's gift of the Scriptures to us. It seems to me that, in the Bible, although of course we're in part given ways to think, we are not given a comprehensive system of thought which is meant to be placed in competition with other systems of thought. Instead, we are presented with a person, Jesus Christ, predicted and explained in the OT, narrated in the Gospels and interpreted in the epistles. That's the center of the Bible, not a system of thought. And the Scriptures don't give us one and one only way to think about Jesus--while the four gospels don't contradict each other, they each have their own perspective and emphases. (It's also interesting to note how the different collections of Mosaic torah in the Pentateuch--Exod 19-24, Leviticus, Deuteronomy 12-26--are all different, each from the other. And this despite obedience to Torah being a life and death matter for ancient Israelites!)

In other words, the systems of thought in the Bible are neither encyclopedic nor necessarily always meant to be in absolute contrast and criticism to other systems of thought. While every other system of thought, being produced, as it is, by sinful humans, will need to be read in light of Scripture, it is possible to be a fully Scriptural Christian and, say, a philosophical occasionalist (as J. Edwards was) or an idealist of one stripe or another. And the Bible is not meant to touch on every area of life: it would miss the whole point of the Bible to say, I don't need to read history, I just read the Bible.

Another aspect of this whole issue which is often missed by those most loudly insisting for a sharp division between secular and biblical thinking is that the distinction is actually itself unbiblical: you can't find it in the Bible itself. This is especially true in the OT, which repeatedly insists that the idols of the nations (read: "secular thinking") are nothing, are worthless--but the OT also hijacks aspects of ANE religion as a fit means and medium of God's self-revelation. I want to hear and take seriously the Bible's unmasking of human idolatry. But it's not always as clearly understood how much God hijacks from that idolatry: he presents himself as a storm deity, just as many other Semitic storm-kings. The "twisting serpent" of Isaiah 27.1 is also mentioned--in exactly the same language--in the Baal Epic, for one of Baal's vanquished foes. The structure of the Mosaic tabernacle basically corresponds to many Egyptian temples (courtyard, holy place, most holy place); Deuteronomy corresponds, in its 6-fold pattern, to other second-millenium pagan covenants; prophetic speech in pre-biblical Aramaic texts and the texts from Mari corresponds strongly (if not perfectly) in language and genre to OT prophecy. This is not to collapse the distinction between pagan/secular and biblical thinking, as if it did not exist--but I think it is impossible to completely isolate them, biblically speaking.